Writing in 2011, a year ahead of the parliamentary elections in Ukraine, I stated in one academic paper that the entrance of the far right Svoboda party to the Ukrainian parliament in 2012 would “spark negative feelings on the part of the Russian minority and contribute to the activization of pro-Russian nationalist movements that could garner support from Russia and advance separatist activities in the largely Russian-speaking regions, such as the Crimea”. Although my prediction seems to have turned out to be right, I missed an important point which lies outside conventional political science: it was not Svoboda’s electoral success in 2012 per se that later energized the pro-Russian nationalists, but rather the portrayal and representation of the Ukrainian far right in general and Svoboda in particular in the Russian media engaged in the extensive information war against Ukraine.

29 May 2014

The results of the presidential election that took place on 25 May 2014 partly confirmed the political trend that had emerged already during the Ukrainian revolution of 2013-2014: despite the active participation of the far right in the revolution, its political role became comparatively marginal. In the presidential election, which led to the landslide victory of democratic candidate Petro Poroshenko already in the first round (54.70%), Svoboda’s Oleh Tyahnybok obtained 1.16% of the vote, while the Right Sector’s Dmytro Yarosh won 0.70%.

True, the results of the presidential election have debunked Putin's narrative about "the fascist coup in Ukraine" - a narrative in which only the Western unreformed left believed anyway. Yet what do we make of the far right's apparent failure in the election? And, eventually, whither the Ukrainian far right?

2 May 2014

"The glorification of Hitler along with the glorification of Stalin, slogans of revanchism, xenophobia, intolerance, anti-Semitism and great-power chauvinism - all these dangerous phenomena, which are developing in the Russian Federation against the background of persecution and repression of all manifestations of democracy in the Russian society, are a challenge to civilised humanity."

This is how some Russians celebrated the International Workers' Day on the 1st of May in Moscow: